Gold-Free Beginner's Guide
The goal of this page is to provide a guide to help beginners through the start of the game without "messing up" in ways that cannot be corrected without spending real money or inordinate amounts of time later on. It will also aim to provide a relatively optimal path to the midgame content. The First Two Cities' Story Lines It may not seem like it if you spend your initial resources unwisely, but you actually start the game with nearly enough resources to make it to the third city without waiting much at all. The following set of steps will get you there assuming you win approximately a third of your fights and aren't that unlucky with the cash won/lost in those outcomes. To give examples of what the notation means: "Waitx3" means "wait ten minutes three times", so wait 30 minutes; "fightx2" means "fight two times"; "stealx1" means "steal a car one time"; "hostx1" means "host a party one time"; "progress" means "progress as far as you can with your current cash and energy"; "Fitness2" means "purchase the second level of the Fitness Center"; "level3" means "progress until you reach level 3"; "collect1" means "finish collection 1 during your fighting"; "Maryx2" means "complete Mary's quests so that she gains two levels"; and "LA" means "finish the storyline in LA". After each instruction will be four numbers which represent my results when testing this procedure myself, and in order they mean: the amount of cash I had, the amount of gold I had, the amount of energy I had, and the amount of stamina I had. Starting from the point where you are first allowed to choose an action other than that the tutorial forces: $$$ GOL ENG STM start: 37615 210 9 3 Fitness2: 36415 210 9 3 fightx3: 36366 210 9 0 level3: 36256 220 12 3 fightx3: 36223 220 12 0 level4: 35948 230 13 3 fightx3: 35970 230 13 0 level5: 36355 241 14 3 fightx3: collect1: 36362 266 14 0 stealx1: 36422 266 10 0 level6: 34707 276 15 3 fightx3: 34737 276 15 0 stealx1: 34797 276 11 0 level7: 33547 286 16 3 fightx3: 33581 286 16 0 level8: 30076 297 17 3 fightx3: 30121 297 17 0 hostx1: 30141 297 15 0 level9: 21651 308 18 3 fightx3: 21621 308 18 0 waitx2: fightx2: maryx2: level10: 14960 319 19 3 progress: fightx3: 10570 319 3 0 waitx1: 10570 319 4 1 fightx1: progress: 5216 319 0 0 waitx3: 5216 319 3 3 fightx3: 5135 319 3 0 waitx2: progress: 5235 319 0 2 fightx2: 5556 319 0 0 waitx3: 5556 319 3 3 fightx3: 5564 319 3 0 waitx2: 5564 319 5 2 progress: fightx2: collect2: 5725 369 0 0 waitx3: fightx3: 5742 369 3 0 waitx2: 5742 369 5 2 progress: 1342 369 0 2 fightx2: 1307 369 0 0 waitx3: 1307 369 3 3 progress: 1407 369 0 3 fightx3: 1419 369 0 0 waitx3: 1874 369 3 3 fightx3 waitx3: LA: 2101 372 0 3 Some of the lines are missing the numbers that come after them only because I forgot to record them while I was going through the test. In order to complete the collections by the suggested times, it is recommended that you steal toward them once you know what you'll need to steal. Because this guide does not have you spend any gold or real currency, you will not need any of the items obtained from normal fighting anyway (those items are only useful for leveling up girls that cost gold or real currency to get). If you add it all up, this first part of the guide takes about 270 minutes to complete, almost all of it during level 10 and the latter parts of the second city. This gives you an idea of how quickly the costs to progress in this game grow. A day after making and posting the above guide, I'm realizing that I completely forgot that registering your new account gives you a free refill of your energy and stamina, along with an extra 10,000 bucks. Because of this, I would recommend the above be changed so that you register your account instead where the first "waitx3" appears (after the second "progress" following advancing to level 10). This will give you 19 more energy, allowing you to skip all of the remaining "waits" except for four of them, so the entire process only takes 80 minutes. Also, the extra 10,000 bucks will allow you to immediately get up to about two-thirds through Wall Street Firm 2 in the following guide (do note, though, that this change results in less fighting, so it may take until later to complete collection 2). Setting up Your Businesses Now that you have access to the first three cities, you can rather optimally start purchasing and running businesses. This is because the fifteen business upgrades in the game which pay for themselves the quickest are all in the first three cities. If you've followed the above guide, you've already bought the best two by purchasing the fitness center and its second level (technically the first level fitness center does not pay for itself that quickly at all, but combined with the second level it becomes the quickest payback in the game). The following lists all of the business levels that pay for themselves more quickly than those outside of the first three cities, in the order that they pay for themselves (when multiple upgrades of a single business are sequential, all but the last are skipped): ROI TPR MCS MTM TTM Fitness Center 2: 576 2.08 2000 N/A 0 Wall Street Firm 1: 889 4.33 2000 960 960 Strip Club 1: 1000 5.83 1500 346 1306 Wall Street Firm 2: 1161 13.58 9000 1543 2849 Sex Salon 2: 1200 15.25 2000 145 2994 Strip Club 2: 1333 21.25 8000 525 3518 Model Agency 1: 1800 21.81 1000 47 3565 Porn Studio 1: 1800 22.92 2000 92 3657 Model Agency 2: 2250 25.14 5000 218 3875 Sex Salon 4: 2550 28.47 8500 332 4207 Porn Studio 2: 2618 31.53 8000 281 4489 Wall Street Firm 3: 2833 37.53 17000 539 5027 The numbers after each business upgrade represent, in order: The time, rounded to the nearest minute, that it takes a given upgrade to pay back its cost ("return on investment"); The profit per minute of all business upgrades up to this point ("total profit"); The marginal cost of this upgrade; The marginal time required at the prior profit rate to save up enough to build this upgrade; The total time required to save up for and build all upgrades up to this point. As can be seen, the total time taken when building these upgrades in this order is at least 5,027 minutes when starting from no cash and only the fitness center at the second level (the 2,101 in cash I still had left after completing the first two cities does reduce this time by about 1010 minutes, but even with good luck you're looking at over 4,000 minutes). The reason it's at least this amount is that the businesses actually pay out in large lump amounts at different times, so it is impossible to buy the next upgrade right when the marginal time listed has passed. Factoring in sleeping, etc., and finishing these business upgrades should take at least five days even if you keep checking the game sixteen hours a day. It may be possible to reorder the upgrades to reduce this some -- specifically by moving Wall Street Firm 2 to later in the list -- but I doubt it will have a huge effect, so in summary the first two cities will take you about four and a half hours and then it makes sense to start the third city after playing for another five days. That's how ridiculous this "game" is when you try to play it without paying money. (Note: By checking more-frequently, energy and stamina can be used to get up to another 3 gold in profit per minute. Together with the time saved from excess starter gold -- especially counting that rewarded for registering -- it may be possible to cut off almost 3000 minutes from the time needed for a person to build up businesses, and thus for a very devoted person to complete all of this in only three days, but it's still a substantial grind no matter what.) Category:Content